The Sterile Techniques!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Although its quite awkwark to talk about steriliation being a third year undergrad, I would like to let people know about the importance of it. As molecular biologists, we have to rely on colony palting and clonning no matter which area of research we go into. The factor underpinning the success behind these techniques is mainly the good output of our lab culture and their subsequent gel results. Even slight contamination can lead to the major error in the experimental interpretation.

Today I learnt about good laboratory practice from Dr Stansfield and also got some useful tips which might be useful for the others:

• Always maintain a concise and clean lab book with which you can talk in your free time!! By stating that I mean always write down everything (i.e. a little spot in one of your gel lanes ) you observe as you may need to interpret that part for your later experimantal steps.
• Always sketch a plan prior to the experiment.
• Never forget to wear gloves while working in the lab.
• Always wash your hand before you enter and leave the lab.
• Write down the lane markers before running a gel as mistake may lead to the repeat of the whole procedure!
• Try to organise your workstation by ordering the tubes, burners, papers around you.
• Try to get the burner going while working with microbial culture.
• Never leave open your pippette tip box or any other tube.
• Never collide the sides of your pippettes with the solution tubes while dealing with them

I will come up with some more tips as I learn through my project.............Have a nice evening!!!!

Synthetic Biology

Hello everybody,

I hope you would be astonished if i talk about a world where you assemble biologicals parts to make a novel system through mathetical modelling !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The recent article in 'Nature' states that.....

'Engineering artificial gene networks from modular components is a major goal of synthetic biology. However, the construction of gene networks with predictable functions remains hampered by a lack of suitable components and the fact that assembled networks often require extensive, iterative retrofitting to work as intended. Here we present an approach that couples libraries of diversified components (synthesized with randomized nonessential sequence) with in silico modeling to guide predictable gene network construction without the need for post hoc tweaking. We demonstrate our approach in Saccharomyces cerevisiae by synthesizing regulatory promoter libraries and using them to construct feed-forward loop networks with different predicted input-output characteristics. We then expand our method to produce a synthetic gene network acting as a predictable timer, modifiable by component choice. We use this network to control the timing of yeast sedimentation, illustrating how the plug-and-play nature of our design can be readily applied to biotechnology. '

Yeap I am working on the synthetic biology to understand the translational mechanism in the Yeast. the project is expected to adopt the novel approach of using translational control mechanism to control gene expression in the budding yeast.

Playing with the logic gates!!!!!!!!!!!!!

From the beginning of my childhood I have been a passionate follower of the biology. I really used to enjoy the frog disection, human anatomy practicals back in my college days. In the university I was overwhelmed by the charms of the enthralling world of the viruses and the micobes and their biochemical properties.

It was not before the second year I came to know about the E.coli manipulation and their realtive implication in the novel biological system. The synthetic biology enables us to combine the novel translational mechanism with the mathematical logica gates in terms of the assembley of the modular signal units. I was really thrilled when Dr Stansfield applied for a studentship nominating me as his project student!!! Thanks to the 'British Biochemcial Society' for providing me teremendous opportunity to examine the logic gates in relation to the translation control in the yeast.